Borderline Writing Apparatus, Prototype #1
Year
1994
Medium
Brass, lead, & foam
Prototype # 1, Borderline Writing Apparatus
The first in a series of apparatus commissioned by the Embassy to write borderlines or frontiers. This apparatus never performed its prescribed function. Endlessly rotating in a circle the apparatus writes with one side and simultaneously erases with the other side. According to Deleuze, the notion of the eternal return is clarified in two specific moments.
The first being one's participation in becoming, thus an affirmation of being; the second being one's recognition that all moments in the world are moments of becoming and that the very fact of being of the world is becoming, therefore, re-affirming that every moment is a return to the state of becoming and that the very fact of being of the world is becoming, therefore, re-affirming that every moment is a return to the state of becoming.
In this notion, Deleuze is influenced by Nietzsche's remarks on Heraclitus regarding the eternal return in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. According to Nietzsche, Heraclitus conceived of the world as a realm of innocent becoming, of 'play as artists and children engage in it', exhibiting 'coming-to-be and passing away, structuring and destroying', as the 'game of the great world-child Zeus'.